Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Bakels Bread Mix

A little while ago I had my first foray into gluten-free breadmaking, with the help of Bakels gluten free bread mix. I bought this mix because it was full of seeds and I prefer my bread to have stuff in it! It contains sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and flax seeds. The mix also contains milk so not suitable for vegans or GFCF, obviously - but I wanted to try something that wasn't just white.

The dough was much wetter than I imagined to be normal for bread - but then again I'd only ever made bread in a bread maker. The dough is more like thick pikelet dough. It's pretty easy to make - there's no kneading, just beating with the hand beater and hey presto!

Hey Presto!

I left it to rise on the floor in front of the heater. I couldn't think of anywhere else that would be even vaguely warm. That seemed to do. It didn't really rise, but it did get a bit lighter, which seemed about right for the consistency of the dough.

Rising?

It took ages to cook, I kept sticking a skewer in and it came out doughy. I don't know, perhaps I had the oven temperature wrong. In fact, our oven only does a few temperatures, so if the recipe asks for something in between, you're left to choose. I chose low - would have been fine if I'd chosen high, as my oven is probably low anyway. We tried fan bake for a little bit, realised we were just crisping the outside, then just left the oven on higher for the last while. It probably took almost twice as long to cook as it was supposed to because of all the temperature changing!

Mmmm cooked bread

When it finally cooked and came out of the oven, and I cut some up while it was still fairly hot and soft. As I was giving a piece to my sister, Neil tasted the bread and exclaimed from the kitchen with GREAT surprise: "What????? This is really good!!! It's not all heavy and bad like gluten free bread!!!!!", which really goes to show that what you get at the supermarket is crapola. When I served the soup to go with the bread he was like: "Can I just have bread?" Not a bad endorsement from a gluten-eater.

Slightly ragged slice of bread

So... success! (even if it did take three hours).

The bread was fantastic that night. I took the rest of the loaf to work with some sandwich fillings to give it the next-day test. The bread wasn't quite suitable for sandwiches - the top broke off as I tried to cut it, and the inside was fairly fragile. I had a few small squares with a peice of tomato on top, and then made a rough sandiwch with cheese and tomato which I toasted. This sealed the outside of the bread and held it together, leaving the inside soft and yummy. The slices were enormously thick to be able to cut the bread without it breaking too much! This made the toastie machine hard to close. But the results were good.

Cheese toasted sandwich (one I made at home, later).

The most fun thing about taking the bread to work was having a few discussions with random people about making bread, and about gluten free bread. One guy I talked to has a daughter who is GFCF and vegetarian. Snap! (Well, almost...)

I'll be happy to make this bread again. In fact, I wish I could eat it right now, so hungry!

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About Me

I am: a foodie; a motorcyclist; a feminist; a pesca-vegetarian; an introvert; a student (even when I'm not); a partner; a sister and daughter; a roller-derby fan; a francophile; and trying my hardest to avoid FODMAPs.